All Fishermen Are Liars Read online

Page 5


  The guy at the fly shop had said, “There’s no reason to be on the river before ten-thirty,” so the next morning we’re fed, rigged up and on the water by half past nine. This is such an old and obvious trick that it shouldn’t work anymore, but it still does, as often as not. We spread out in two of the best pools on the river and kill an hour sipping coffee as cars filled with guides and fishermen slow down, spot us and then speed up again, heading to their second choice.

  Doug and Vince have gone upstream to grab a spot that will keep two fishermen busy through an entire hatch. There’s a long pool with a wide tailout below an even longer riffly run. This whole stretch is lousy with trout, it pumps out flies like a factory and it’s a rare day when there’s no one fishing it. I can’t see Doug and Vince from where I am, but I know that one of them has taken the pool and the other has staked out the riffle: positioning themselves to block anyone working in from above or below.

  This is a famous and often heavily fished river: one of Colorado’s best and some say the best for dry flies. It’s not exactly combat fishing, but you do pick up certain passive-aggressive techniques. Grabbing your spot early is one. Parking smack in the middle of small turnouts so there’s no room for another car to squeeze in on either side is another, not to mention fishing in the shoulder seasons when there aren’t as many tourists around. That kind of thing.

  I’ve volunteered to fish a smaller spot downstream. This isn’t much of a run, but the sweet spot is a small back eddy against the far bank. If you could wade four feet closer to it, you could get a decent high-stick, dapping dry-fly drift, but you’re stopped short by a steep drop-off, so you’re reduced to trying for a severe pile cast with a hard left-handed aerial mend.

  I’ve been fascinated by this spot since I first fished it in the mid-1970s. The first time I saw it, I said to the guy I was with, “I can’t make that cast.” He replied, “Me neither, but if we don’t try, we’ll never learn.” Thirty-some years later there are days when I still can’t make the cast and others when I can just manage it. I’ve caught a few nice big trout there, plus others that were smaller, but still on the high side of average. Two fish is the best I’ve ever done, although even one fish constitutes a victory and on days when the wind buggers my cast or I’m just off my game, I’ve spooked the pool with dragging flies and gone away skunked. It’s a good place to start the day because everything else will be easier.

  That morning I go through the normal drill. I tie on the Morgan’s Midge that worked yesterday, wait for the hatch to start and then wait a while longer, until three trout start rising in the eddy and get into a rhythm. Then I wade out to the shelf, manage several passable drifts and get a thick, heavy fifteen-inch rainbow. He puts up a good tussle on 7x tippet, and at one point I think he’ll get into the next riffle and run me downstream, but then he stops in the tailout and I land him where I stand.

  The commotion puts down the other two fish, so I wade to shore and sit on a flat rock that’s been polished by eons of flowing water with a final buffing applied by the asses of fishermen clad first in canvas, then latex, then neoprene and lately Gore-Tex. I check my leader for nicks and wind knots, cut off my fly and tie it back on with a fresh knot, think about cleaning my line but don’t, and try the coffee I’ve left in an insulated cup on the bank, but it’s stone cold. Those other two trout back in the eddy still haven’t started rising again and I don’t feel like wasting the hatch waiting for them, so I walk up to horn in on Doug and Vince. The stretch they’re fishing is big enough for two strangers or three close friends.

  Not counting that first day when we’re in a hurry to get to the river, we brew our own coffee, pack our own lunches and do as much cooking as possible in the room to save money. But we always eat breakfast at the Two Rivers Café. It’s half a block from the motel and it’s the last café in town that opens early and that hasn’t morphed into a “bistro” and tripled its prices. There are two schools of thought when it comes to breakfast. I’ve seen Vince start a day of fishing on a bowl of oatmeal, which is fine if you like that sort of thing. But then the hatch can last until three on a good day, which makes it a long way till lunch, so I tend toward eggs, grits, sausage and biscuits at a minimum, adding flapjacks if the weather is cold.

  This year it’s sunny, chilly in the mornings and in the high forties by early afternoon. The same week last year we white-knuckled over the mountains in a moderate blizzard and fished for four days in steadily falling snow and knee-deep drifts. I’ll take either extreme or anything in between as long as the midges are hatching, but all fishing weather can have its advantages.

  Midges have been known to hatch heavily on gray, cold days, and trout can be more aggressive when the light is low. Wind sucks for casting (it’s always coming from the wrong direction), but it can mash the flies onto the surface and get the fish gorging on cripples. Trout can be skittish on bright, sunny days, but you have the benefit of being able to spot them in the clear water.

  After a childhood spent lowering worms out of sight into dark water, I’ve become a sucker for the visual stuff, which is the only real reason I prefer dry flies to nymphs. I’ll never get over the sight of a trout coming off the bottom in three feet of clear water to eat, or at least look at my fly. Once you get accustomed to this quick glimpse, you can tell if it’s a brown or a rainbow and get a good sense of its size, all in the space of a split second. The brilliant high-altitude sunlight that allows that to happen is also what gives Colorado its high incidence of skin cancer, which is why the wide-brimmed fishing hat is not entirely an affectation. You may look like a doofus, but you’re more likely to keep your ears and nose well into your seventies.

  The Morgan’s Midge produced well, as advertised, but one day at a long run known as Rosie’s, I locate a pod of rising trout that don’t like it. Of course, this isn’t unheard of. This is the kind of small, technical river where not even the right fly works all the time and where you’ll now and then see fish refuse naturals out of general paranoia. Still, a fly that’s been working usually fools two or three trout out of a pod of a dozen or fifteen steady risers.

  Just for the hell of it, I try the Hatching Midge. I get a brief glance and what looks like a shrug from one small brown, but that’s it. No surprise there. These are fashion-conscious trout that would no sooner eat last year’s fly than they’d wear white after Labor Day.

  The Morgan’s Midge I’ve been using consists of a short trailing husk made of two or three strands of fine, root-beer-colored tinsel, a gray thread body, a stubby wing made of gray CDC and a sparse grizzly parachute hackle tied around a white foam wing post. The post is then cut off flush, leaving a tiny white button that, amazingly, can often be spotted on the water at a range of forty feet or more. I tie the ratty one I’d been using back on my tippet, and in a fit of creativity, cut the wing off with my nippers. Of course you’ve crossed some kind of line when you start trimming pieces off a size 22 fly because it’s too bushy, but that’s what we’ve come to on some tailwaters where sophisticated tackle and heavy fishing pressure have made the fish preternaturally selective.

  I catch four trout in seven casts with the wingless fly and then it starts fluttering weirdly on the false cast. When I strip it in, I find that the hackle has come loose and is sticking out to the side. This had been a well-tied fly that had stayed together through something like twenty trout, but nothing lasts forever. I reach for my nippers to cut off the fly and put on a fresh one, then get a wild hair, nip off the hackle and fish it that way. There isn’t much left of the fly now—just the trailing husk, some thread and that little foam button—but it works better than it had before. I get four or five more trout on it before I finally spook the pod.

  On the way back to town that afternoon, we stop to see my friend Roy Palm. Roy lives on a private stretch of river—a quarter mile or so of some of the prettiest and fishiest water in the valley—but he’s not one of the wealthy landowners who’ve
arrived in recent decades. In fact, he’s an old river rat who wangled his way onto this property in the late sixties or early seventies and has held on through a series of maneuvers that would have given a Wall Street banker a migraine.

  Since then he’s largely left the streambed alone, but he’s taken some small browns out to avoid overcrowding and keep the size up and he did build a head-gate-controlled side channel so wild fish from downstream can spawn unmolested. He also built benches at several of the best runs for solitary river watching. When I first fished this property, it was a jungle of willow and cottonwood saplings, but in recent years the banks have gotten more manicured. It’s easier to fish now, but less wild-looking. There’s been a revolving roster of hunting dogs around the place and two of them—both yellow Labs—are buried in neatly marked graves above the high water line at a place called the Tree Pool. I remember them both as pups, especially Flicka, who once ate my hat.

  Over the years Roy has done every job imaginable to get by, but since I’ve known him he’s guided, owned and run fly shops and tied flies professionally. Many of the standard flies on the river first came from his vise (including some rustled patterns that now bear other people’s names). His flies were always admirably spare and simple, but now that he’s more or less retired and no longer worries about selling flies, his patterns have become totally minimalist. The last batch he showed me consisted of nearly naked hooks with a little thread and a wisp of wing or a half turn of hackle: just the barest suggestion of an insect. These flies aren’t what you’d call commercially viable, but they’re deadly, and their delicacy would be startling even if they hadn’t come from the big hands of a man who looks, sounds and sometimes acts like a bear.

  Roy’s fishing seems to have gone in that same direction. He was never a fish hog, but by now a day of fishing consists mostly of watching fish feed, examining insects on the water and then tinkering at the vise. He might catch a trout or two to test a pattern, but then he’ll retire to one of the benches again to watch and think—usually with his two current Labs and a fresh drink. Roy reminds me of a character in a James Crumley novel who had “a heart as big as all outdoors—and a liver as big as a salmon.”

  You could say that Roy is proprietary about this stretch of river. He’s been fairly generous with access over the years—more generous than I would have been—but when someone has an especially good day, he might mosey out to announce that they’ve caught enough of his babies and it’s time to quit. They probably felt pleasantly alone up till then, but at that moment they realized they’d been under surveillance the whole time.

  It’s widely believed that Roy shoots at trespassers, but that’s not strictly true, although he does have rifle targets set up at strategic places along the river, so that if you were trespassing, you might inadvertently stumble into the line of fire of his flat-shooting varmint rifle. Technically speaking, that would be an unfortunate coincidence. When the sheriff stopped by after one incident, Roy shrugged and said, “There ain’t supposed to be anyone back there.”

  We sit on the back porch drinking coffee and talking for an hour or so, and then Roy invites us to come back and fish there the next day.

  We show up at ten-thirty the following morning and spend what seems like half the hatch walking the river as Roy points out, in excruciating detail, how insect drift lines, currents and holding water came together into specific feeding lanes, with special emphasis on the quiet, bank-hugging seams you could easily miss.

  This is knowledge accumulated over decades spent watching more and fishing less, and although I’ve fished this place myself off and on for thirty years, I’m learning things I hadn’t yet figured out. So I listen attentively, but it takes the better part of an hour, fish are feeding the whole time and I begin to get a little twitchy. I’m not a fish hog either, and I do aspire to the enlightened vantage point that would let me watch trout rise without wanting to cast to them. Still, my internal voice keeps saying, “Dude, get a hook in the water!”

  When the tour is finally over, I wade into the shelving riffle above the Camp Pool and tie on a Morgan’s Midge. I’ve clipped the wings off all the ones I have left, but I’ve provisionally left the hackles on because, although I now know better, I still like all the little bells and whistles. I pick my fish and land eight or nine real nice ones before the hatch peters out. I don’t know if Roy is watching or not, but I suspect this is a number he’d consider appropriate.

  6

  NEW WATER

  Like most of the trout streams in my life, I first saw this one from the window of a moving car. We were at right angles to each other at a narrow bridge, going our separate ways. It was just a sidelong glance: not much more than a fisherman at the wheel registering flowing water off his left shoulder.

  Farther along, the road turned to roughly parallel the stream and there were longer glimpses through the trees and then full views. In this stretch it was mostly riffles with uniform cobble bottoms and darker slots at the bends where fish would hold. I followed it downstream as it took on small tributaries with unremarkable names like Willow, Spruce, Moose, Buck, Bear, and Boulder creeks and grew from a creek itself to a good-sized stream and finally to a proper little river.

  This was a stream I’d heard of in passing. It was said to be no more than ordinary cutthroat trout water, and with bigger, more fashionable rivers in the neighborhood, it wasn’t crowded. I remember seeing a few fly fishers, but they didn’t look like the fancy kind. Most wore ditch boots and no vests. One guy was wading wet in blue jeans. With a Stetson pulled down to shade his eyes, he looked like a sleepy cowpoke in a Charles Russell painting. But although this was a good time of year to fish and the stream was clear and at a nice flow, there were miles of open water and dozens of pull-offs where no cars were parked.

  At a crossroads at the bottom of the canyon, I stopped to get gas and coffee and, being endlessly curious about the headwaters of trout streams, I traced the stream backward on a map. It flowed in from the west, where it crossed contour lines and gathered the shorter blue lines of a few smaller creeks. It ran under the road at the bridge, where I first saw it and then made a dogleg to the north against a ridge. Upstream of the bridge, the stream drained part of one mountain range; downstream it drained part of another. Altogether it was an area of something like thirteen hundred square miles. So many roads in the West are built along streams and rivers that you can begin to picture the place as wetter than it really is, but you get a clearer sense of the preciousness of water when you stop to think how little of it has run off that much land.

  As with all mountain streams, this one seemed isolated high up in its own watershed. It took a conscious act of will to imagine it going on to join a larger river, which joined a larger one yet and so on for well over a thousand river miles to the coast. Before dams and head gates, you could have floated a pinecone all the way from here to the Pacific. Once upon a time, steelhead migrated from the coast to within less than a hundred miles of where I stood stretching my legs and studying a map before hurrying on my way.

  This road isn’t a main route to anywhere in particular unless you’re a fisherman, but I am a fisherman, so I saw the stream other times over the next dozen years or so, always from a car window and always on my way elsewhere. It became part of my personal map of the region, which is simple-mindedly all about watercourses. It always looked interesting, but somehow never quite interesting enough to make me change my plans. I guess I’d hit one of those patches where my fishing had become purposeful and I’d temporarily lost the playful aimlessness of someone with all the time in the world.

  I finally fished it higher up on the drainage with a friend. It just happened, in the way of things that are long overdue. We were in the neighborhood anyway and for once we were in no hurry. My friend knew a landowner, called in a favor and we ended up on a stretch of water above that first bridge that I’d never seen before but that I might have picked off the map
as a likely sweet spot.

  Upstream of where we fished, it was a mountain creek that tumbled down through twenty miles and several thousand feet of mixed spruce and pine woods on Forest Service land. There were a few places where you could four-wheel down to it, each with well-worn old campsites, but most of it was temptingly roadless: miles and miles of small, trouty-looking pocket water.

  Downstream of that, it flowed out across fifteen miles of pastureland in a small, open valley. Here it slowed and stretched out into pools, riffles and wide meanders extensive enough to cover nearly twice the length of its own valley with the prettiest little western trout stream you’ll ever see. The mountain range upstream to the west loomed. Its signature 10,000-foot peak was ten miles away, but in the clear, thin air it looked close enough to hit it with a rock. The mountains downstream were higher and craggier, but even at a range of thirty miles you could still pick out distinct snowfields. I moved to the Rocky Mountains forty-two years ago and have been here as a more or less successful transplant ever since. I suppose I now take it all for granted almost as much as those who were born here, but every once in a while I see something like this and remember why I don’t live in Cleveland.

  This was a more or less intact working ranch that covered most of the small valley. It was exactly the kind of place you’d have settled yourself, but not for the beautiful trout stream as you now think. Back in the old days you’d have been a hard-bitten homesteader with an eye to cattle, so you’d have seen water for stock and to flood-irrigate hay, plus handy lumber that could be skidded off the hillsides and free food in the form of deer and elk. You’d have ended up with the entire valley not because you had delusions of grandeur—although that may also have been true—but because you’d need every last square foot of that poor pasturage to make a spread pay. The trout in the stream would have meant nothing more than the odd afternoon off and a break from a steady diet of red meat.